Volcano on ‘tormented’ moon has 80,000,000,000,000-watt eruption making it 'biggest ever volcanic eruption in our solar system'
A extraterrestrial volcano on a ‘tormented’ moon has whopping 80 trillion watt eruption.
This makes it the ‘biggest ever volcanic eruption in our solar system’.
The Icelandic eruptions emitted from the volcano Eyjafjallajökull was so large that it grounded flights across Europe in 2010.
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However, there is another volcano in outer space that puts anything we have on Earth to shame.
It was first detected by NASA’s spacecraft Juno when it noticed a giant lake of fire on a moon in our solar system.
Io, which is the second smallest of Jupiter’s four moons is home to over 400 active volcanoes.
The area of the fire took up an incredible 100,000 sq km (62,137 sq miles), breaking a previous record set by another volcano on Io.
And it’s thought that the power of the eruption is ‘well over’ 80 trillion watts.
Scott Bolton, who is the Juno spacecraft’s primary investigator, shared that the data from the eruption ‘really blew our minds’.
He said: “This is the most powerful volcanic event ever recorded on the most volcanic world in our solar system — so that’s really saying something.”
The Juno spacecraft has been orbiting around Jupiter for the past nine years after it took five years to make the journey from Earth.
Since then, it has been sending information about the largest planet in our solar system and its four moons back to Earth.
Alessandro Mura, who is a Juno co-investigator, said: “We have evidence what we detected is actually a few closely spaced hot spots that emitted at the same time, suggestive of a subsurface vast magma chamber system.”
The reason while volcanic activity is so abundant on Io is because of its close orbit around Jupiter.
The gas giant’s huge gravitational pull causes the moon to be ‘relentlessly squeezed’ according to NASA, which causes volcanic eruptions.
On the space agency’s website, it revealed that Juno will be using an upcoming, more distant flyby of Io on March 3 to look at the hot spot again and search for changes in the landscape.
Earth-based observations of this region of the moon may also be possible.
Bolton went on to say: “While it is always great to witness events that rewrite the record books, this new hot spot can potentially do much more.
“The intriguing feature could improve our understanding of volcanism not only on Io but on other worlds as well.”